Constitutional amendment

Last week the house voted in favor of a Senate bill, raising the tax by four cents a gallon - and Governor Hassan has said she’ll sign it. We’ll look at the implications of the state’s first gas tax increase in twenty three years.

The 10th Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the federal government back to the states. But where the line between federal and state power lies has been debated for centuries, including recent debates over gay marriage, gun rights and abortion. We’ll take stock of the Tenth Amendment, and the implications for policy that flow from it.

A case in Wisconsin is testing the limits of the Fifth Amendment in the digital age. In January, the FBI seized 20 terabytes of hard drives from Jeffrey Feldman, a man accused possessing underage pornography – but could only decrypt 20% of it. Until last week, a federal court judge had placed the burden on the defendant to decrypt the rest or face charges of contempt. Last week, his attorney successfully argued an emergency motion to extend that deadline. She claims that asking Feldman to decrypt files that would be used against him in the case is a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Declan McCullagh is chief political correspondent and senior writer for C-Net and has been following the story.

Our founding fathers established this right to be “secure against unreasonable search and seizure” but how far should that right extend? In the age of terrorism, how broad should police surveillance powers be...in the interest of public safety? And how do past debates shape our understanding of this amendment today?